RADIO DANCE

“I run across the floor. Jump, roll and spin. Some classical music is playing – probably 'In the hall of the mountain king'. I flutter with my invisible butterfly wings and reach towards the ceiling. I spin and spin and spin. Eventually I fall down in a heap on the floor and I lie there, catching my breath and let the spinning wash over my body. As waves. I have just turned 5 years old, the year is 1986 and Olof Palme has just been murdered.”

“Radio Dance” is a solo dance performance that deals with dance and history filtered through a personal life story. Nadja Hjorton uses the radio format and the performance moves through a subjective dance history that makes visible, and questions, a general dance history. In the performance Nadja is broadcasting her radio program live, a program that covers her own life from childhood to adulthood with Sweden and the world's political climate as a back drop. It is a program about dance and dancing. The autobiographical take in "Radio Dance" is also an attempt to talk about perspective - which artists and practitioners must relate to their history and which ones can ignore theirs? With a nostalgic touch and some sentimental fragments, “Radio dance” moves from the intimate to the large, from the personal to the common and from the past to the now.

Through listening, dancing and storytelling Nadja Hjorton attempts to create an event that invites and allows its spectators to be both attentive and unwary.

Nadja Hjorton is a Swedish choreographer and dancer based in Stockholm. She got her dance education at Balettakademien in Stockholm and her MA in choreography at The University of Dance in Stockholm (DOCH) under the direction of Mårten Spångberg. Nadja is interested in thinking choreography through different contexts. She has worked collectively with choreographers such as Zoe Poluch, Stina Nyberg, Halla Olafsdottir and Amanda Apetrea and together they constitute a group of artists working with dance and choreography in Sweden, seeking to challenge norms and notions of what choreography and dance is and can be. In December 2013 they worked together and made a piece, SAMLINGEN, for the Cullberg Ballet at the Dance museum as a part of the Dance <3 Stockholm festival. Nadja is also part of the feminist collective ÖFA-kollektivet that has created and performed in several festivals and venues such as Imagetanz, Brut Institute in Vienna, Sommerszene in Salzburg, Nordwind in Berlin, Tweetakt in Utrecht, Uppsala City Theatre and National Theatre in Stockholm. In 2012 she made the performance Crime Scenes at the City Theatre in Gothenburg together with Carolina Frände. 2013 she directed the performance Meningen med döden at the City Theatre of Stockholm.

For a number of years, Nadja has been giving lectures and teaching at Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts (STDH), The University of Dance and The University College of Arts, Craft and Design.

In 2013-2014 Radio Dance has been presented at the festival Sommerszene in Salzburg, Dance Umbrella in London, at Dansens hus and Parkteatern in Stockholm among others.